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South Asia
Organized Panel Session
Resurgent, right wing nationalisms mark the first two decades of the 21st century. This hypernationalism -- the hardening of identities and borders --mirrors an impulse toward “paranoid sovereignties,” and, arguably, to de-nationalization as solution to border and 'minority' problems. In this light, our panel examines the relationship between bordering practices and knowledge practices – bureaucratic, spatial, military, and so on, – to better grasp the logic at play in contemporary efforts to “unmake” citizenship. The panel uses detailed studies of the Rohingyas of Arakan and Bengalis of Assam to explore mutually entangled processes of knowledge production and border enforcement that enable a politics of minority disenfranchisement. Taking into account deeply contested narratives around borders and belonging, an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners explore questions of belonging and (im)mobility, the violence of bureaucratic procedures, and the politics of historical knowledge formation in relation to making claims on the nation.
Dina Siddiqi
New York University
Chowdhury Abrar
Dhaka University, Bangladesh
David Ludden
New York University
Sanjib Baruah
Bard College
Navine Murshid
Colgate University